Vocal attractiveness in Cantonese: A production study

This paper presents a production study investigating the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task, followed by a production task where they were presented a subset of the same faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male, they were less breathy, lower in pitch, and with denser formants. Participants who were more satisfied with their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed in terms of the body size projection principle. Copyright © 2019 Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.